Author: geraldgreene

The CDC has come under attack for the way they have handled the Ebola crisis. The CDC is staffed by smart people, many brilliant, and overall serve the nation well. Their Ebola problem is one of inexperience. I’m sure the CDC underestimated the current strain of Ebola. Studying in a laboratory is far different from having field experience.

Ebola Protective Gear

Consulting with Doctors Without Borders before Ebola arrived in the US would have prevented a lot of grief. Perhaps a bit of hubris was involved. After all, DWB is a French organization. What could they possibly know? They’ve only fought Ebola in Africa since it was first discovered.

Ebola:Five ways the CDC got it wrong

By Elizabeth Cohen, Senior Medical Correspondent CNN

A nurse contracts Ebola. An urgent care center in Boston shuts down when a sick man recently returned from Liberia walks in. Health care workers complain they haven’t been properly trained to protect themselves against the deadly virus.

Public health experts are asking whether the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is partly to blame.

Here are five things they say the CDC is getting wrong.

1. The CDC is telling possible Ebola patients to “call a doctor.”

When passengers arrive in the United States from Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea, they’re handed a flier instructing them to “call a doctor” if they feel ill.

Never mind how hard it is to get your doctor on the phone, but even if you could, it’s quite possible she’d tell you to go to the nearest emergency room or urgent care center.

We saw how well that worked at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. On September 25, the hospital sent a feverish Thomas Eric Duncan home even though he had told them he’d recently been to Liberia.

And we’ve seen how well that worked in Massachusetts, where an ill man recently returned from Liberia walked into an urgent care center, which then evacuated its other patients and closed for several hours.

One way to do it differently: Set up a toll free number for returning passengers that would reach a centralized office, which would then dispatch a local ambulance to get the patient to a hospital.

The hospital would be warned that a possible Ebola patient is on the way, and the patient would not be brought through the main emergency room.

That’s the idea of Gavin Macgregor-Skinner, an assistant professor at Penn State’s Department of Public Health Sciences.

“Do you really want someone with Ebola hopping on a bus to get to the hospital? No,” he said. “And once they get there, do you want them sitting in the waiting room next to the kid with the broken arm? Again, no.”

CDC Director Tom Frieden faces rising tide of criticism

2. The CDC director says any hospital can care for Ebola patients.

“Essentially any hospital in the country can safely take care of Ebola. You don’t need a special hospital to do it,” Dr. Thomas Frieden said Sunday at a press conference.

“I think it’s very unfortunate that he keeps re-stating that,” said Macgregor-Skinner, the global projects manager for the Elizabeth R. Griffin Foundation.

He said when it comes to handling Ebola, not all hospitals are created equally. As seen at Presbyterian, using protective gear can be tricky. Plus, it’s a challenge to handle infectious waste from Ebola patients, such as hospital gowns contaminated with blood or vomit.

Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, said some hospitals have more experience with infectious diseases and consistently do drills in how to deal with biohazards.

“If you were a burn unit patient, wouldn’t you want to go to a burn unit?” he said.

3. The CDC didn’t encourage the “buddy system” for doctors and nurses.

Under this system, a doctor or nurse who is about to do a procedure on an Ebola patient has a “buddy,” another health care worker, who acts as a safety supervisor, monitoring the worker from the time he puts on the gear until the time he takes it off.

The “buddy system” has been effective in stopping other kinds of infections in hospitals.

Skinner said the CDC is considering recommending such a system to hospitals.

Taking care of Ebola patients is tricky, because certain procedures might put doctors and nurses in contact with the patient’s infectious bodily fluids.

At Sunday’s press conference, Frieden hinted that Presbyterian might have performed two measures — inserting a breathing tube and giving kidney dialysis — that were unlikely to help Duncan. He described them as a “desperate measure” to save his life.

“Both of those procedures may spread contaminated materials and are considered high-risk procedures,” he said. “I’m not familiar with any prior patient with Ebola who has undergone either intubation or dialysis.”

Osterholm said CDC should coordinate with medical groups to come up with treatment guidelines.

“We could have and should have done it a few months ago,” he said.

5. The CDC put too much trust in protective gear.

Once Duncan was diagnosed, health authorities started making daily visits to 48 of his contacts.

But that didn’t include several dozen workers at Presbyterian who took care of Duncan after he was diagnosed. They weren’t followed because they were wearing protective gear when they had contact with Duncan. Instead, they monitored themselves.

Public health experts said that was a misstep, as the CDC should have realized that putting on and taking off protective gear is often done imperfectly and one of the workers might get an infection.

How did Dallas nurse contract Ebola?

“We have to recognize that our safety work tells us that breaches of protocol are the norm, not the exception in health care,” said Dr. Peter Pronovost, senior vice president for patient safety and quality at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “We routinely break precautions.”

Skinner said that in this case, self-monitoring worked, but that monitoring from health officials can be beneficial, too, and so health care workers who were involved in Duncan’s care will now get daily visits from health authorities.

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. Submitted to ZeroHedge.com by Tyler Durden on 10/17/2014 10:20

Forget medical experience, what the USA needs to combat the worst Ebola pandemic ever is “an American lawyer and political operative best known for serving as Chief of Staff to two Vice Presidents – Al Gore (1995–1999) and Joseph Biden (2009–2011).” Gotta wonder how Tom Frieden feels about this…

President Obama looks worried. Another layer of bureaucracy may not fix the problem. What then? Another political operative? What do you think?

A Worried Man

Via Wikipedia,

Ronald A. “Ron” Klain is an American lawyer and political operative best known for serving as Chief of Staff to two Vice Presidents – Al Gore (1995–1999) and Joseph Biden (2009–2011). He is an influential Democratic Party insider. Earlier in his career, he was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Byron White during the Court’s 1987 and 1988 Terms and worked on Capitol Hill, where he was Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination. He was portrayed by Kevin Spacey in the HBO film Recount depicting the tumult of the 2000 presidential election.

Early lifeKlain was born on August 8, 1961 in Indianapolis and grew up in a Jewish home. He graduated from North Central High School[4] in 1979 and was on the school’s Brain Game team, which finished as season runner-up.[citation needed] He graduated summa cum laude from Georgetown University in 1983. In 1987, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School,[4] where he won the Sears Prize for the highest grade point average in 1984-85 and was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Capitol Hill career

Klain’s early experience on Capitol Hill included serving as Legislative Director for U.S. Representative Ed Markey. From 1989 to 1992, he served as Chief Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, overseeing the legal staff’s work on matters of constitutional law, criminal law, antitrust law, and Supreme Court nominations. In 1995, Senator Tom Daschle appointed him the Staff Director of the Senate Democratic Leadership Committee.

Clinton administration

Klain joined the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992. He ultimately was involved in both of Bill Clinton’s campaigns, oversaw Clinton’s judicial nominations, and was General Counsel to Al Gore’s recount committee in the 2000 election aftermath. Some published reports have given him credit for Clinton’s “100,000 cops” proposal during the 1992 campaign; at a minimum, he worked closely with Clinton aide Bruce Reed in formulating it. In the White House, he was Associate Counsel to the President, directing judicial selection efforts, and led the team that won confirmation of Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Klain left the judicial selection role in 1994 to become Chief of Staff and Counselor to Attorney General Janet Reno. In 1995, he became Assistant to the President, and Chief of Staff and Counselor to Al Gore.

Gore campaign

During Klain’s tenure as Gore’s Chief of Staff, Gore consolidated his position as the likely Democratic nominee in 2000. Still, Klain was seen as too loyal to Clinton by some longtime Gore advisors. Feuding broke out between Clinton and Gore loyalists in the White House in 1999, and Klain was ousted by Gore campaign chairman Tony Coelho in August of that year. In October 1999, he joined the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers. A year later, Klain returned to the Gore campaign, once Coelho was replaced by William M. Daley. Daley hired Klain for a senior position in the Gore campaign and then named him General Counsel of Gore’s Recount Committee.

Legal career

In 1994, Time named Klain one of the “50 most promising leaders in America” under the age of 40. In 1999, Washingtonian magazine named him the top lawyer in Washington under the age of 40, and the American Bar Association’s Barrister magazine named him one of the top 20 young lawyers nationwide. The National Law Journal named him one of its Lawyers of the Year for 2000.

Lobbying

Klain helped Fannie Mae overcome “regulatory issues”.

2004-2008
During the 2004 Presidential campaign, Klain worked as an adviser to Wesley Clark in the early primaries. Later, during the General Election, Klain was heavily involved behind the scenes in John Kerry’s campaign and is widely credited for his role in preparing Senator Kerry for a strong performance in the debates against President George W. Bush, which gave Kerry a significant boost in the polls.[6] He then acted as an informal adviser to Evan Bayh, who is from Klain’s home state of Indiana. Klain has also commented on matters of law and policy on televised programs such as the Today Show, Good Morning America, Nightline, Capital Report, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and Crossfire.

In 2005, Klain left his partnership at O’Melveny & Myers to serve as Executive Vice President and General Counsel of a new investment firm, Revolution LLC, launched by AOL co-founder Steve Case.

Obama administration

On November 12, 2008, Roll Call announced that Klain had been chosen to serve as Chief of Staff to Vice President Joe Biden, the same role he served for Gore. Klain had worked with Biden previously, having served as counsel to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary while Biden chaired that committee and assisted Biden’s speech writing team during the 1988 presidential campaign.

Klain was mentioned as a possible replacement for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, but opted to leave the White House for a position in the private sector in January 2011.

Klain apparently signed off on President Obama’s support of a $535 million loan guarantee for now-defunct solar-panel company Solyndra. Despite concerns about whether the company was viable, Klain approved an Obama visit, stating, “The reality is that if POTUS visited 10 such places over the next 10 months, probably a few will be belly-up by election day 2012.”

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Anyone watching TV news sees doctor after doctor proclaiming the Ebola virus is spread only by direct contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids. Not only doctors are saying this, but government officials from the President on down say the same thing. The CDC has made such statements repeatedly, although in recent days has walked them back a bit. It could be in an effort to prevent panic the CDC is reluctant to tell us everything it knows.

A minority of doctors and researchers have made alarming statements. Some say Ebola is already an airborne disease.

The Alarming Thing is This Group Has Ebola Experience.

Growing concerns over ‘in the air’ transmission of Ebola

By Matt McGrath

Canadian scientists have shown that the deadliest form of the Ebola virus could be transmitted by air between species.

In experiments, they demonstrated that the virus was transmitted from pigs to monkeys without any direct contact between them.

The researchers say they believe that limited airborne transmission might be contributing to the spread of the disease in some parts of Africa.

They are concerned that pigs might be a natural host for the lethal infection.

What we suspect is happening is large droplets – they can stay in the air, but not long, they don’t go far. But they can be absorbed in the airway”

Dr Gary Kobinger
Public Health Agency of Canada
Ebola viruses cause fatal haemorrhagic fevers in humans and many other species of non human primates.

Details of the research were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the infection gets into humans through close contact with the blood, secretions, organs and other bodily fluids from a number of species including chimpanzees, gorillas and forest antelope.

The fruit bat has long been considered the natural reservoir of the infection. But a growing body of experimental evidence suggests that pigs, both wild and domestic, could be a hidden source of Ebola Zaire – the most deadly form of the virus.

Now, researchers from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the country’s Public Health Agency have shown that pigs infected with this form of Ebola can pass the disease on to macaques without any direct contact between the species.

In their experiments, the pigs carrying the virus were housed in pens with the monkeys in close proximity but separated by a wire barrier. After eight days, some of the macaques were showing clinical signs typical of Ebola and were euthanised.

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The NFL briefs anxious players on Ebola ahead of the Giants trip to Dallas.

1. Guys will think twice about bringing their families.
2. Giants owner said Cowboys will get disease first.
3. The team advised that they are more likely to die in a plane crash.

By Toby Moses
theguardian.com, Thursday, 16 October 2014

The NFL is briefing teams on how to reassure anxious players, with the New York Giants getting help from Duke University’s Infection Control Outreach Network before their visit to Dallas to play the Cowboys this weekend.

Anxious NY Giants Head to Dallas

The memo reassures the players that the media attention is out of proportion to the threat posed, and that they are more likely to die in a plane crash than from Ebola. However, if the players do come into contact with anyone who recently travelled to or from west Africa they are instructed to tell team doctors immediately.

“I think guys might think twice if they were planning to bring their wives or their families with them on a trip like this, because why take a chance?” said cornerback Prince Amukamara.

“But I think the team is doing a good job making sure we have all of the information we need.”

The full letter from the experts to NFL doctors and trainers was published in full by USA Today. It warns that the key risk factor is travel, and that there can be no transmission of the disease unless a sufferer has symptoms.

Two weeks ago the Giants co-owner Steve Tisch was asked about preparations for the Giants’ visit to Dallas, saying his team was not scared, but he replied on the subject of Ebola that “the Cowboys are going to get it first, so it’s to our advantage.”

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The number of healthcare workers infected by the Ebola virus keeps raising. These are workers using PPE equipment and experienced at working with contagious patients. No wonder Ebola is such a terrifying disease.

In the US the odds of catching Ebola is small. Still panic is spreading. The economic impact could be severe. A few more Ebola cases and the economy will suffer greatly as people become afraid to travel to anyplace that places them in crowds.

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/16/2014 09:47

If trained professionals (in West Africa and the US) are becoming infected by the deadly Ebola virus, what hope is there for fellow passengers in a tightly-packed metal tube? The World Health Organization expects Ebola cases to top 9000 this week and deaths to exceed 4500 as they shockingly note 427 healthcare workers are now infected.

Ebola Healthcare Workers

The economic impact of Ebola continues to rise as Liberia slashes its GDP estimate and East African nations discuss strategies to stop the spread from the West. In Europe, Germany is sending aid, the Spanish nurse is stable, but Madrid airport activated emergency measures due to a suspected Ebola passenger. US screening restrictions increase as Yale New Haven Hospital is dealing with a patient with Ebole-like symptoms. Politicians begin debating travel bans as Dallas is expected to approve a “state of disaster” today. Contained?

Officials claim the Spanish Ebola nurse is ‘stable’ and 68 low-risk people are being monitored (via Bloomberg)

Of 68 “low-risk” people being monitored for Ebola infection in Spain, one developed low fever this morning, Fernando Simon, coordinator of the center of alerts and emergencies at Spain’s health ministry, says innews conferencePerson has fever above 37.7 degrees: Simon
15 “high-risk” contacts are still all asymptomatic: Simon
Ebola patient Teresa Romero is stable; viral levels are falling, still not negative: Simon
But Madrid airport activated emergency measures… (via Reuters)

Madrid’s Barajas international airport activated emergency measures on Thursday after a passenger arriving on an Air France flight was suspected of possibly having Ebola, a spokeswoman for airports operator Aena said.

Spain’s health ministry confirmed that an Ebola emergency protocol had been set in motion but declined to give details.

Aena and Air France said in separate statements that a passenger on Air France 1300 from Lagos via Paris had started shaking during the flight. Air France said the other passengers disembarked from the plane, which will now be disinfected. The return flight has been cancelled.
And Germany is sending aid… (via Bloomberg)

Liberia cuts its GDP estimate… (via FrontPageAfrica)

Economic “growth is expected to be zero percent in 2015,” due to Ebola, contraction in mining activity, agriculture, services, Finance Minister Amara Konneh says in interview with online edition of Monrovia-based newspaper.

Disease “seriously affected economic activities and livelihoods throughout the country with domestic food production, mining activities, hospitality industry, and transport services all declining.”And East African nations are in full panic mode…

“We have already seen an impact on our economies, regarding reduced tourism flows, flight cancellations,” Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta says at conference in Rwandan capital, Kigali.
East African Community is being “proactive to avoid the spread of the virus to EAC countries”
5-nation bloc also looking for ways to help affected countries
EAC includes Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.

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Two dozen Ebola cases in the entire US isn’t really a lot. That is, unless they’re in your neighborhood. Those at greatest risk are health workers. Workers at Texas Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas must be terrified.

Another risk is the economic one. Panic over Ebola can severely affect airlines, hotels, restaurants, theaters, shopping, and even voting. Ebola is a terrifying disease. Who wants to mingle when there is even the slightest risk of infection?

U.S. Ebola Cases May Exceed Two Dozen by November, Researchers Say.

By Michelle Fay Cortez and Lorraine Woellert

There could be as many as two dozen people in the U.S. infected with Ebola by the end of the month, according to researchers tracking the virus with a computer model.

The actual number will probably be far smaller and limited to a couple of airline passengers who enter the country already infected without showing symptoms, and the health workers who care for them, said Alessandro Vespignani, a Northeastern University professor who runs computer simulations of infectious disease outbreaks. The two newly infected nurses in Dallas don’t change the numbers because they were identified quickly and it’s unlikely they infected other people, he said.

Ebola Virus

The projections only run through October because it’s too difficult to model what will occur if the pace of the outbreak changes in West Africa, where more than 8,900 people have been infected and 4,400 have died, he said. If the outbreak isn’t contained, the numbers could rise significantly.

“If by the end of the year the growth rate hasn’t changed, then the game will be different,” Vespignani said. “It will increase for many other countries.”

Staying Rational

The model analyzes disease activity, flight patterns and other factors that can contribute to its spread.

“We have a worst-case scenario, and you don’t even want to know,” Vespignani said. “We could have widespread epidemics in other countries, maybe the Far East. That would be like a bad science fiction movie.”

The worst case would occur if Ebola acquires pandemic status and is no longer contained in West Africa, he said. It would be a catastrophic event, one Vespignani says he is confident won’t happen.

“Let’s be rational for the next couple of months,” he said. “We aren’t going to have an invasion of cases. After November, we need to reassess the situation and see what is the progress of containment in West Africa.”

It’s reasonable to expect one or two more imported cases in the next couple of months, plus related infections in health care workers, he said.

It’s unlikely that Ebola will ever exceed 20 cases in the U.S. or Europe because of their extensive health care infrastructures, said Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, a non-profit think tank in Washington, D.C. The problem in the developed world will center more on the economic impact, he said.

“The damage is not as much in the number of deaths as much as in the panic it creates and all the disruption it creates in trade and travel,” he said. “It’s important for public health officials to strike a balance between being serious and certainly not creating panic.”

“It’s not going to be like the movie ‘Contagion,’” he said.

The infection of two nurses who cared for Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S., has some worried that the virus may be mutating and becoming more infectious. When trying to extrapolate those cases, people should remember five other Americans were flown to the U.S. for care, said Eli Perencevich, professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. None of them transmitted the virus.

Average Americans shouldn’t see any risk from the virus outside of the medical community because patients aren’t terribly infectious until the disease peaks, Perencevich said. In industrialized areas like the U.S., those people will be in the hospital, he said. Health care workers, though, are uniquely vulnerable.

Hospital Fears

“There’s a high probability that there will be another person who comes in, no matter what we do, but the risk is in the hospital,” he said in a telephone interview. “As long as people who know they have been exposed to the virus get themselves quickly to the hospital, even after they have started a fever, it should be OK because they aren’t that infectious.”

Getting to the hospital could be difficult for some people, said Maria Cristina Garcia, a professor of history at Cornell University, who has written extensively about refugees and immigrants. While any international traveler could import Ebola, Garcia worries that the outbreak may give Americans another reason to fear or lash out against immigrants.

“An immigrant, like any other person in the U.S., is concerned about cost and confidentiality,” she said. “If he cannot afford a hospital stay, he might avoid seeking treatment until it’s too late. He might also fear coming forward for fear of stigma. Those of us who lived through the 1980s remember how Americans responded to the AIDS crisis during the early years.”

It’s possible that a handful of infected travelers could spread the virus to new areas, especially given its long latency period, said Jeffrey Shaman, who is modeling the outbreak at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. The models that show a possible range of cases in various countries are a good place to start, although there are so many variables that to some extent they are flying blind, Shaman said.

“Human folly and human nature plays into this,” he said in a telephone interview. “All these chains of human error can lead to these things emerging in little clusters. The real question is can we contain it.”

Ebola virus is a frequent search over most search engines today. At our website, we tried to gather the best pieces of information for you. In case you liked the article above, we would recommend you to browse through our article gallery for more valuable takeaways on the subject matter. Please remember the articles we present are collated from mainstream websites. Hopefully, MSM is reporting accurate information as known today.

Ebola Spreads in US. Plane Travel Will Suffer.

Ebola is here and it’s on the move. Passengers on a Frontier Airlines flight from Cleveland, Ohio to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport may have been exposed to the Ebola virus. How about the workers who clean the plane? And the flight attendants and crew? And workers at the airport? Incomplete protective protocol at the Dallas hospital may have profound consequences.

Second Texas Nurse with Ebola had Traveled by Plane

BY LISA MARIA GARZA AND TERRY WADE

A second Texas nurse who tested positive for Ebola after caring for a patient with the virus had traveled by jetliner a day before she reported symptoms, U.S. and airline officials said on Wednesday.

The worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas had taken a Frontier Airlines flight from Cleveland, Ohio to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport on Monday, the officials said.

The woman, identified to Reuters by her grandmother as Amber Vinson, 29, was isolated immediately after reporting a fever on Tuesday, Texas Department of State Health Services officials said. She had treated Liberian patient Thomas Eric Duncan, who died of Ebola and was the first patient diagnosed with the virus in the United States.

The circumstances under which Vinson traveled were not immediately known. But the latest revelation raised fresh questions about the handling of Duncan’s case and its aftermath by both the hospital and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

At least 4,447 people have died in West Africa in the worst Ebola outbreak since the disease was identified in 1976, but cases in the United States and Europe have been limited. The virus can cause fever, bleeding, vomiting and diarrhea, and spreads through contact with bodily fluids.

“Health officials have interviewed the latest patient to quickly identify any contacts or potential exposures, and those people will be monitored,” the health department said in a statement.

During the weekend, 26-year-old nurse Nina Pham became the first person to be infected with Ebola in the United States. She had cared for Duncan during much of his 11 days in the hospital. He died in an isolation ward on Oct. 8.

The hospital said on Tuesday that Pham was “in good condition.”

News of the second nurse’s diagnosis follows criticism of the hospital’s nurses of its initial handling of the diseases, in a statement Tuesday by National Nurses United, which is both a union and a professional association for U.S. nurses.

The nurses said the hospital lacked protocols to deal with an Ebola patient, offered no advance training and provided them with insufficient gear, including non-impermeable gowns, gloves with no taping around wrists and suits that left their necks exposed.

‘PILED TO THE CEILING’

Basic principles of infection control were violated by both the hospital’s Infectious Disease Department and CDC officials, the nurses said, with no one picking up hazardous waste “as it piled to the ceiling.”

“The nurses strongly feel unsupported, unprepared, lied to, and deserted to handle the situation on their own,” the statement said.

The hospital said in a statement it had instituted measures to create a safe working environment and it was reviewing and responding to the nurses’ criticisms.

Speaking early Wednesday on CBS “This Morning,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell declined to comment on the nurses’ allegations.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said at a news conference Wednesday that the second infected nurse lived alone and had no pets.

He said local health officials moved quickly to clean affected areas and to alert her neighbors and friends. A decontamination could be seen taking place at her residence.

EARLY WAKEUP

Residents at The Bend East in the Village apartment complex were awoken early Wednesday by text messages from property managers saying a neighbor had tested positive for Ebola, and pamphlets had been stuffed beneath doors and left under doormats, said a resident, who asked not to be named.

Other residents were concerned enough that they were limiting time spent outdoors.

“Everybody thinks this won’t happen because we are in the United States. But it is happening,” said Esmeralda Lazalde, who lives about a mile from where the first nurse who contracted Ebola resides.

Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital is doing everything it can to contain the virus, said Dr. Daniel Varga of Texas Health Resources, which owns the hospital. “I don’t think we have a systematic institutional problem,” he said at a news conference on Wednesday.

At the same briefing, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, the county’s chief political officer, said authorities were anticipating additional possible Ebola cases.

“We are preparing contingencies for more, and that is a very real possibility,” Jenkins said.

The CDC said in a statement that it was performing confirmation testing of Texas’ preliminary tests on the new patient.

CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden said Tuesday the agency was establishing a rapid-response team to help hospitals “hands on, within hours” whenever there is a confirmed case of Ebola.

Frieden has come under pressure over the response and preparedness for Ebola, but White House spokesman Josh Earnest said U.S. President Barack Obama was confident of Frieden’s ability to lead the public health effort.

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The Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, Texas, says they’re following procedures established by the CDC. The CDC says procedures to contain Ebola are adequate. Clearly, the news that a second health worker at the hospital has been infected with Ebola indicates procedures should be reviewed. Perhaps the protocol is flawed.

Within days, additional health workers will likely be reported as infected. The CDC needs to get help from Doctors Without Borders. For years, DWB has been treating Ebola patients in Africa. Not one of their health workers has been infected.

Second Health Worker Has Ebola as Nurses Criticize Safety

By Caroline Chen, Darrell Preston and Romy Varghese

A second health-care worker in Texas tested positive after caring for an Ebola patient, opening new questions about oversight lapses by federal officials and spurring a nurses’ group to criticize safety precautions used within the hospital.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team that responded within a day after Thomas Eric Duncan was admitted to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital was focused on contact tracing and did not care for the patient, said Dave Daigle, a CDC spokesman, in a telephone interview.

At the time, National Nurse’s United, a labor union, said the hospital left Duncan for hours in an area with other patients, supplied safety suits with exposed necks, forcing nurses to use medical tape to cover their skin, played down the need for more protective face masks, and sent Duncan’s lab specimens through the system without being specially sealed.

“The clinical care was done by the hospital’s clinical care team,” Daigle said. “We did consult with the team and the hospitals” but did not provide direct care.

Texas officials didn’t comment on the nurses’ complaints during a morning conference call. The focus for health officials in Dallas is now toward the future, said Judge Clay Jenkins, the county’s chief executive, during the call. The county is preparing contingencies for more cases, he said.

“It will get worse before it gets better, but it will get better,” added Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings at the briefing.

Immediately Isolated

The worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital reported a fever yesterday and was immediately isolated at the hospital, the Texas Department of State Health Services said in a statement today. The preliminary Ebola test was run late yesterday at the state public health laboratory in Austin, and results were received at about midnight.

This is the second health-care worker infected with Ebola while caring for Duncan, a Liberian visitor to the U.S. who died at the hospital last week. Asked at the briefing about the hospital’s performance, Daniel Varga, the chief clinical officer for the hospital group, said “I don’t think we have a systemic institutional problem.”

’’No one wants to get this right more than we do,’’ Varga said.

The nurses’ union said the information about hospital safety lapses came from “registered nurses” at the hospital “who have familiarity with what occurred at the hospital.” The Dallas nurses chose to remain anonymous “out of fear of retaliation,” the union said in a statement.

Contacts Identified

Health officials have interviewed the latest patient “to quickly identify any contacts or potential exposures, and those people will be monitored,” the Texas health department said. The type of monitoring depends on the nature of their interactions and the potential that they were exposed to the virus, according to the statement.

“An additional health-care worker testing positive for Ebola is a serious concern, and the CDC has already taken active steps to minimize the risk to health-care workers and the patient,” the CDC said in a statement today. “The CDC and the Texas Department of State Health Services remain confident that wider spread in the community can be prevented with proper public health measures.”

The new case is the third known instance of Ebola transmission outside of Africa, where the worst-ever outbreak is raging in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. A nurse who treated Duncan, Nina Pham, has contracted Ebola, as has Teresa Romero, a Spanish nursing assistant who cared for two infected missionaries evacuated to Madrid for treatment.

Airline Screening

The infections outside Africa have spurred the U.S. and U.K. to begin screening some airline passengers on arrival in the past few days.

“It’s really concerning that health workers wearing full personal protective equipment have developed Ebola,” said Raina MacIntyre, a professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

“The initial response of the authorities has been to blame the nurse, that they made a mistake in the donning and doffing of equipment or made some mistake in the protocol” she said. “But it’s also possible that the guidelines aren’t adequate.”

Surgical masks may also be inadequate, and respirators that provide more protection should also be considered, she said.

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